EMAKI 絵巻
Digital Cinema/Giclée Art Prints/Performance Installations as part of Tempo Dance Festival 2017, Auckland Art Gallery Auditorium, and Arts Festival Dunedin 2018 for Toitū Settlers Museum. Official exhibitions and gallery performances hosted by Gallery OUT of PLACE Nara 2017, and Gallery OUT of PLACE Tokyo 2018, Japan. Official selection International Portrait Film Festival 2020. Finalist International Sound Future Awards 2023. Supported by the Creative New Zealand Asia Artform Exchange Fund, Art Space of Osaka, Tokyo Denki University, Gallery OUT of PLACE Japan, and Creative New Zealand toi Aotearoa’s International Presentation Fund.
For Mahoroba Emaki our digital realm is a construct of the picture scroll - the scroll conjures narratives through which the dancer figure voyages. The Japanese ink art of Suminagashi is digitised to suggest sentient hills, mountains, ocean, geology, weather systems and the Five Elements. Each episode is an interaction with one of the elements - these scenes are performed by Japanese Movement Artist, Meri Otoshi. She embodies a choreographic meditation and a physical responding to the multi- dimension world of the picture scroll. Otoshi conveys the human figure deeply held in nature. Mahoroba Emaki creates a series of chapters which reflect and project the human spirit in cinematic expression.
Mahoroba is an old Japanese word that means “wonderful place” and “a place to live”. Mahoroba Emaki creates a sanctuary space to which Otoshi has the “keys”. When we walk into nature our senses heighten - our perception, intuition, and listening expands out into the surroundings. Mahoroba Emaki offers a transparent, malleable space where memory is layered. The scroll surface is a gateway between the digital and the physical, the world of spirit and the world of form.
Taonga Puoro and sound-landscape recordings from New Zealand combined with Japanese Shakuhachi flute and Biwa recordings create an acoustic bridge between Asian and Pacific cultures for this unique project. Jac Grenfell's new music underscores the emotional ebb and flow of the film. A series of scenes that evoke Haiku, reveal an intimate quest from Otoshi as she breathes new light into old places.
The Mahoroba Emaki film illuminates the concept of mono no aware 物の哀れ, literally ‘the pathos of things’. It is a Japanese term for the awareness of transience and the impermanence of things imbued with a wistfulness at their passing. Also suggesting an empathy toward, or a sensitivity to ephemera. In the array of beliefs that Japanese culture has developed to express ways of relating to nature, one that is especially useful is that of the deeply personal ‘perception of things’, which is the driving force that defines Japanese culture through the relationship with nature, a force nourished and enriched through being actively exercised. It refers to a concept in the national aesthetic, the mono no aware.
Key Creatives: Meri Otoshi, Naotoshi Osaka, Richard Nunns, Donnine Harrison and Jac Grenfell with Daniel Belton.
“Emaki is a beautiful, meditative work that conveys a sense of peace and wonder” DANZ Magazine
“Belton and co-artists have developed a work that is sublimely beautiful” Theatreview New Zealand
Film excerpt:
Reviews
EMAKI - Daniel Belton and Good Company Arts
Oct 2017 | Auckland Art Gallery (Tempo Dance Festival) | Reviewed by Francesca Horsley
Without doubt award-winning film-maker Daniel Belton has an extraordinary poetic vision – in his digital dance films his imagination travels beyond the spatial confines or gravitational pull of earth into the far reaches of space and time.
His dancers can inhabit ancient stone, as if waking fossils to release their spirit. They can be wedged or balanced between intricate geometric patterns or rendered to ethereal figures that gather in the heavens as if assemblies of angels. The earth is often represented as a sphere – beautiful yet remote. In Emaki (Mahoroba Emaki) the real world bursts through to populate Belton’s digital time travel. After visiting Japan, and the ancient city of Kyoto, Belton has created an elegant and mesmeric work, encompassing four elements of nature, and Japanese historic and sacred sites. Mostly set in black and white, a dancer, Japanese movement artist Meri Otoshi, calmly negotiates each scene of the journey as if illustrating a traditional Japanese scroll.
In the water element Otoshi feeds tame Shika deer from her hand when she visits the Kosan-ji Temple forest; she balances on the scroll as if on a diving board projected out in space in the section titled the Void. In the wind element a soft breeze brushes her hair as she traces her hand across the surface of an ancient wall in Nara Park, and the entrance of Todai-ji Temple. Fleeting or shadowy images come and go. The ghostly outlines of ancient puppeteers shuffle and gesticulate a language of signals. In the fire element the carved inscriptions on an ancient stone in the To-ji Temple convey a sense of wonder and timelessness, and finally in the earth element, surrounded by a bamboo forest, she rides atop the mysterious megalith Rockship of Masuda in Asuka as it travels through space.
All these windows of action are set against a floating, digitally created, landscape - webs of pressure waves expand or subside as if fuelled by galactic winds and currents. Twitching and shifting contours of fine lines suggest turbulent waves or folding hills. A complex sound-landscape – blends of Taonga Puoro, Japanese Shakuhachi flute and Biwa recordings and Jac Grenfell's new music – amplifies the work’s cross-cultural wealth.
Otoshi is always in command – scooping her arms or thrusting hands, she bends and arcs, balances or lunges, advancing along pathways or riding into a mystical space. She is a signifier, uniting past, present and timelessness; a voyager articulating a semaphore of coded movement, or as Belton writes, “scenes that evoke Haiku”. Mahoroba, Belton says is an old Japanese word that means “wonderful place” and “a place to live” and Mahoroba Emaki creates a sanctuary space to which Otoshi has the “keys”.
There is an element of French author and mid-20th century pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose works such as Wind, Sand and Stars and The Little Prince paid tribute to the poetic purity of flight above the earth - all the while longing for its warmth and vitality.
Emaki is a beautiful, meditative work that conveys a sense of peace and wonder. Deeply rich in Japanese symbolism whose artefacts are distant and mysterious, yet framed within a natural environment, it celebrates a treasured earth and speaks to the custodial role of mankind.
AN ANCIENT-CONTEMPORARY MYSTICAL JOURNEY
Oct 2017 (Tempo Dance Festival) EMAKI - Daniel Belton and Good Company Arts at Auckland Art Gallery Auditorium | Reviewed by Carol Brown
Belton and Good Company's latest work features the artistry of Meri Otoshi, Jac Grenfell and Naotoshi Osaka. A meditation on travel through physical and virtual landscapes, the 35-minute, single-screen video sees a lone dancer, Meri Otoshi, navigate diverse terrains through an ancient-contemporary mystical journey.
In this work, blooming pixel-drawn spaces become a visual scenography that entangles movement in layers of time. Organic and geometric filigreed networks enframe Otoshi as she travels, becoming palpable matter which suggests a relation between interior and exterior lifeworlds. Shaped by algorithmic environments of vegetal, gestural and digital patterning, Belton and co-artists have developed a work that is sublimely beautiful.
Navigating different elements and environments, Otoshi's pathway intersects with architectural fragments that appear to hover and extrude in these scapes - a white rectilinear plane, a window of gossamer threads, polygon mesh – she negotiates these terrains with somatic curiosity and quiet attention, her movement always precise and detailed. At one point, she lunges; her hands flexing from the wrists, flicking and pecking the air in syncopation to a drumming rhythm. At the same time, a group of dancing figures form a shadow chorus that traverses and dissects the cinematic volume. Dressed in traditional clothes including veils over their faces, they appear as ancient and enduring figures.
Montages created through video editing, machine vision and motion graphics shape a textured world that references the Japanese art of suminagashi, paper marbling. Described as a ‘digital picture scroll' of dance, sound and light, Emaki (Fire Element) developed through Belton and his collaborators drawing on the Japanese tradition of handscrolled narrative painting called emaki. Traditionally composed of sheets of paper or silk joined horizontally and rolled around a dowel, emaki handscrolls are like books, unfurled one segment at a time. Turning a handscroll into a choreo-cinematic experience Belton and collaborators unfurl scene-by-scene detail of an imaginatively constructed world.
I was reminded of the journeys of characters in Ursula Le Guin's science fiction fantasies such as the Earthsea Trilogy. Quests that involve journeys with uncertain outcomes, that take us into imaginary worlds where there are discoveries to be made. The choreographic logic of scrolling lends itself towards the cinematic structure and framing. We read the images from one side to the other, unperturbed by an absence of figure-ground stability. In this floating world, mesh networks grow and decay like gossamer threads. Sounds interpenetrate this sepia-toned world as resonating frequencies that thrum and stir the air turning movement into song.